Reelgood’s ‘2023 Year in Streaming’: How Streamers and Their Customers Responded to One of the Video Industry’s Most Disruptive Years Ever
It was another year of profound disruption for the video entertainment industry.
Hollywood writers and actors went on strike, paralyzing movie and TV production for more than five months.
Wall Street lost its will in regard to the heavy quarterly losses that came with fighting the “Streaming Wars,” forcing large entertainment companies to pivot from deficit-spending on content for the sake of building user scale on direct-to-consumer streaming services. Not only did some major media conglomerates produce fewer shows in 2023, some trimmed titles from their platforms in order to save on things like royalties and taxes.
Meanwhile, investor pressure forced another strategic shift on behalf of these same suppliers, which had previously chosen to horde their own content for the sake of building their own direct-to-consumer user scale. In 2023, a number of media conglomerates returned to an “arms dealer” approach to content distribution, once again selling movies and TV shows to competitors including Netflix in order to improve revenue and drive quarterly bottom lines.
All the while, long-established linear distribution schemes continued to erode, with CBS winning the 2022-23 broadcast TV season in total audience, even though it averaged fewer than 6 million viewers in prime time. Twenty years ago, NBC won the same crown with an audience more than twice as big.
As for the future of TV? Nothing has changed. Consumers are still going to stream it. In fact, U.S. consumers streamed more content overall in 2023, not less.
But amid the industry’s wildly disrupted backdrop, these consumers are caught in the middle, searching for desired content that has became scarcer, more confusingly dispersed and generally harder to find.
That’s where Reelgood comes in. Each month, millions of users turn to Reelgood to not only find out where specific movies and TV shows they want to stream can be found, but also for recommendations on programming they might like but don’t yet know about.
And as these millions of consumers use our platform daily, Reelgood has developed invaluable insights into not only the kind of content they’re looking for, but how major suppliers are responding to that demand.
Reelgood’s 2023 Year in Streaming report showcases just a few of the data-rich snapshots generated by our award-winning streaming guide and AI-based recommendation engine.
As it turns out, Reelgood can provide a very useful compass for video entertainment industry decision-makers, as well.
For example, which major U.S. subscription streaming services added titles to their catalogs in 2023 and which ones shed movies and TV series?
As the major U.S. streamers continued to evolve into more distinct brands, which specific genres did each favor and which ones did they marginalize? In short, what types of movies and TV shows did each major streaming supplier produce and acquire this past year?
Meanwhile, on the demand side, with fewer newer titles emerging from production pipelines in 2023, did consumers turn to legacy films and shows?
What titles did streaming users love the most this past year? And what titles were most searched for by consumers?
The snapshots included in Reelgood’s 2023 Year in Streaming report provide valuable insight in regard to these broad industry questions. And for those who want to know more about the U.S. streaming industry, Reelgood is standing by at sales@reelgood.com, armed with tons more actionable data.
